Planet- and Moon-Factory

Understanding better planet- and moon-formation is a key to comprehend how planetary systems –including our own – came to be.

To study these processes, we need computer simulations of their birthnests, the disks around the young stars (circumstellar disks) where planets are born; and disks aroundforming planets (circumplanetary disks) where moons assemble.

Circumplanetary disks are located withinthe circumstellar disks and they were first detected observationally in June 2019, after twenty years ofnumerical simulations predicting their existence. Therefore, it is very timely to study their characteristics.Circumplanetary disks have three main roles.

Firstly, the are channelling material to the forming planets,hence they regulate the formation timescale and the final planetary mass. Secondly, they are the birth-placefor moons to grow.

Thirdly, they surround and embed the forming planet, hence affect the observationalappearance of forming planets.Developing state-of-the-art gas-dust thermo-hydrodynamical simulations, combining them with radiativetransfer, N-body simulations, and for the first time with machine learning, offers a completely new windowto reveal how planet- and moon-formation takes place.

The three scientific projects of this proposal are: I.Understanding the thermo-hydrodynamical effects on planetary growth, on the formation timescale atdifferent locations of the circumstellar disk, and hence the diversity of the final planetary masses.

II.Observational predictions of forming planets from the simulations – which instrument can be used todetect them, what information can be gained from these observations, and what are the generalcharacteristics of circumstellar disks determined with machine learning. III.

Studying moon-formation inthe circumplanetary disk, provide predictions of how the exomoon population looks like, and what fractionof exomoons is detectable with current and near-future instrumentation.